Scott Stinson: Ontario Liberals prepared to coast through four months off the job

Ontario Liberals prepared to coast through four months off the job

On the scale of actions unlikely to effect political change, I’m not sure if “create online petition” comes just before or just after “write open letter.”

You can decide for yourself, then, if Opposition leader Tim Hudak has ramped up his campaign of protest against Dalton McGuinty’s decision to seek prorogation of the provincial legislature, the Premier’s penultimate move before he resigned last week.

Mr. Hudak, the Progressive Conservative leader, sent Mr. McGuinty an open letter last Tuesday in which he asked the premier “to immediately commence a new session of the legislature without delay.”

On Sunday, he issued another letter, which begins: “It has been a week since I last wrote you calling on you to immediately recall the Legislature.”

Aside from making him sound like someone having customer-service issues with a lousy retailer, Mr. Hudak’s letter-writing campaign has garnered no response from Mr. McGuinty. And so, the PCs broke out the online petition on Monday, asking members to sign their “Get Back to Work, Liberals” pledge and spread the word on the Twitter and such. The PCs were actually a couple of days behind the NDP in this regard, Andrea Horwath’s party having started their “Get MPPs Back to Work” petition last week.

The governing Liberals, meanwhile, are having none of it, announcing on Sunday that they will hold a leadership vote on Jan. 25. The smart money suggests the new premier will bring the legislature back on Feb. 18, immediately following the Family Day holiday. That would be four months and three days since Lieutenant-Governor David Onley agreed to Mr. McGuinty’s request to suspend the legislature — a request that came, apparently, with no end date attached and which left the fate of the legislature in the hands of the Ontario Liberal Party executive, who ultimately decided that four months was the right amount of time to keep Parliament closed. They, too, were unswayed by prospect of a petition or two.

This is not to blame Mr. Hudak or Ms. Horwath for trying. Good for them for at least keeping the stink of prorogation in the air, but that’s about all they can do: procedural rules don’t allow them to will the legislature back, even if they wanted to band together and try. Instead, they are left to promote their online campaigns — and even those will become old news in a matter of days.

The Liberals, meanwhile, appear determined to ride it out, hoping, presumably, that prorogation will cost them as much politically as it did Stephen Harper, which is to say not much at all. Dwight Duncan, the Finance Minister who is considering a leadership bid and would seem the obvious candidate to carry forth the banner of the McGuinty cost-cutting agenda, tried to justify the prorogation in different ways during a weekend interview with CBC Radio’s The House. He complained that legislative matters had ground to a halt, despite the fact Mr. Duncan himself had spoken at Queen’s Park of the prospects of further wage-freeze negotiations with the PCs only hours before Mr. McGuinty resigned. He also offered that there was a chance the PCs and NDP would have combined to bring down the government had the legislature been sitting after Mr. McGuinty’s resignation. Except the opposition was about to begin Finance Committee hearings into the gas-plant scandal — are we truly to believe they would have cut this short to run a snap election for which they were unprepared? Plus, with no money bills in the offing, the government could easily have avoided a confidence vote that would have toppled it.

Among current provincial Liberals, even those who aren’t enthused about prorogation aren’t really opposed to it. Kathleen Wynne, the Municipal Affairs Minister and another on the list of possible leadership candidates, told reporters last week that there was “discomfort” with “having the legislature shut.” But then she said, as quoted by the Toronto Star: “Nobody wanted to do that; it’s not our first choice. We want this to go quickly; we want the people’s place to be open.”

Saying “we wish we didn’t have to do this,” is plainly not the same as saying “we should reopen the place right now,” which so far no Liberal MPP has managed to say. That no one has broken ranks suggests they don’t want to become outcasts while the party is still in power.

The sad part is that the strategy might well work. The gas-plant affair has been shelved, for now, and opposition members will soon struggle to make themselves noticed with nothing happening at Queen’s Park.

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